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Abstract

The paper wrapping is one of traditional cultures in Japan, like the paper folding Origami. The technical interest is related to how to decorate goods beautifully along the shapes, and also the requests from daily-life usage are to resolve how to protect goods from external shocks, to carry out materials/goods safely, and so on. Thus, the paper wrapping is intelligent and creative work. This paper addresses a method which can design the target-oriented wrapping procedure successfully and support users’ wrapping works effectively. In order to attain this objective, the authors introduce the knowledge usable in the paper wrapping process and then construct a stage tree to represent various kinds of wrapping means systematically under this knowledge. The authors propose a framework which makes up the paper wrapping process so as to be appropriate to individual target-objects and describe an approach to support the wrapping process visually.

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1. Introduction

The paper wrapping takes various kinds of roles to protect goods from external shocks, decorate goods beautifully, carry out materials easily, etc. The make-up means or procedures are different and varied in accordance with the object shapes, sheet sizes or wrapping purposes. In order to wrap target-objects by paper sheets successfully the heuristics or experiences are necessary, and in many cases the knowledge about paper wrapping has been informed repeatedly by hand-in-hand from experts. Thus, it is not always easy for beginners to wrap various shapes of target-objects by appropriate paper sheets compactly or adaptively. Of course, the paper wrapping is one of many intelligent and creative activities (Almeida, Teixeira-Dias, & Medina, 2011; Bottino, Ott, & Tavella, 2011): the factors such as object shape, object quality, paper size, paper feature, wrapping purpose, wrapping usage and so on are critical elements for intelligent work. In this paper, we address a paper wrapping method to support cooperative operations for beginners, based on knowledge about adjacent relationships among wrapping-side faces. Traditionally, though the instruction textbook is useful as a typical support means for paper wrapping, the existing instruction textbook cannot show individual states of wrapping shapes in 3-dimensional view, but does only one-side of corresponding shapes in 2-dimensional form (Saleeb & Dafoulas, 2011). Also, in many cases illustrations as samples of paper wrapping are mainly instances of box-types, but these instances are not always adaptable to our various requests. In order to assist various operations in the paper wrapping process successfully, the method whose functionality supports the characteristic design work in the wrapping procedure should be necessarily established.

The researches about paper folding have been popular in comparison with those about paper wrapping (Hull, 1994). Many of these researches are related to computer geometry, and aimed to make the mathematical features clear (Lang, 1996; Belcastro & Hull, 1999; Kawasaki, 1991, 1994). For example, Shimanuki et al. proposed an advanced folding design method which can transform 2-dimensional paper sheet, designed creatively with folding lines, into 3-dimensional Origami directly, and visualized the folding procedure explicitly by using the computer animation or computer graphics (Shimanuki & Watanabe, 2002, 2006). Namely, they made it explicit that the folding features among neighboring or related folding lines take an important role to design the structure of target-object, but could not investigate the instructional stepwise procedure for several operations. Miyazaki et al. proposed the interactive operation system of paper folding, which instruct respectively the folding procedure based on stepwise interactions (Miyazaki, Yasuda, Yokoi, & Toriwaki, 1996). In this system, users operate interactively computer-generated Origami in 3-dimensional display window by mouse, and the system validates the operations of user in Origami model and then displays the correctly-operated folding shape in the appropriate step or replies the message “wrong operation”. In this case, Origami model takes an important role to check up whether individual operations are correctly indicated in accordance with the successive folding procedure. However, the paper wrapping is inherently different from the paper folding in Origami: the basic wrapping operation “wrapping-in”, which attaches closely a wrapping sheet to the side-faces of corresponding goods, is not supported in the paper folding, and also the wrapping-specific textbook is not usually published as we can get the folding textbook easily.